How BRP turned feedback into insights

Bombardier Recreational Products (BRP) is a global leader in powersports vehicles and propulsion systems that has built a name for itself crafting beloved products like the ubiquitous Ski-Doo snowmobile and Sea-Doo watercraft. Yet in 2015, they faced a new challenge in understanding their customers’ wants and needs. They had a wealth of meaningful unstructured feedback data but no clear way of turning it into insight. That’s when they sought help from Keatext.

Spearheading their efforts, as BRP’s Global Customer Advocate, was Myshka Sansoin, who was hired in 2014 to lead the company’s VoC program. Her principle mandate: to help BRP understand their customers’ needs and satisfy them. No pressure, right? Should be straightforward. Though perhaps not, when you have nearly 10 years of surveys and call-center transcripts to make sense of. To get there, Myshka required a text analytics solution that would meet three main challenges.

Challenge 1: Unstructured, siloed data

As Myshka searched for the right solution, feedback was pouring in directly from consumers and indirectly from dealerships through a wide range of channels: social media, forums, Salesforce case requests, surveys and call centers. Moreover, a better part of the feedback was the result of open-ended questions, which meant customers were often communicating through free-form language, making it even more difficult to aggregate and contextualize. At the time, BRP’s approach was to go through the feedback manually, which was painfully time and labor-intensive: “We didn’t have a method of putting it together to get a 360-degree view of what our customers were telling us. We needed an easier way to leverage and understand the feedback, because we knew it was so rich.”

Myshka was looking for a system to quickly aggregate data from different channels and accurately uncover what customers thought, felt and desired. Only then would she have enough tangible data – in other words, proof – to influence internal stakeholders to make agile, customer-centric decisions that would fulfill the company’s needs.

Challenge 2: Multilingual sentiment analysis

While numerical data was obviously key to providing accurate insights and context for the company’s decision-makers, Myshka knew they needed more than word counts – a unique tool was required to help them understand the sentiment and emotions behind the words. Was “better” being used to say people expected better, or that they had never received better customer support? What’s more, given BRP’s global customer base, the tool would need to understand and aggregate linguistic nuances in the two languages most of the feedback was expressed in: French and English.

Challenge 3: Frictionless implementation

By removing the manual work and biases from BRP’s VoC research, the company’s best people would be freed up to proactively find new ways of improving their products, building engagement and addressing customer dissatisfaction. But there was no point in making this team available only to put them through months of grueling implementation and testing before seeing solid results. The solution needed to be effortless and quick, while providing crucial independence from the company’s IT and development departments.

The Solution: Keatext

With a clear understanding of everything the text analytics solution needed to provide, Myshka knew right away that Keatext was up to the task: “When I looked at different solutions, I quickly concluded that Keatext was the best in the business. Not only are they experts in artificial intelligence and feedback interpretation, but their collaborative approach and flexible structure was really impressive. Their adaptability was important to us, and they readily adjusted to our requirements when possible. Even now when we need support, they’re immediately responsive. For us, that’s essential.”

That easy collaboration gradually permeated BRP’s relationship with its customers as the company integrated essential Keatext metrics into their problem-solving and decision-making. Now that they had accessible, accurate insights into user sentiment, BRP took it to the next level – fostering transparency and collaboration not only between different teams and decision-makers within the company, but between the company and its biggest stakeholders: its customers.

To tackle the diversity and intricacies of BRP’s unstructured feedback, Keatext’s complex Machine Learning algorithm was specifically trained to aggregate and contextualize multilingual customer experience data and transform it into easy-to-understand reports. This allowed Myshka and her team to take the pulse of their customer base at a glance.

Myshka’s favorite features

Text categories: Keatext’s algorithm divides your feedback into four categories: problems, praises, questions and suggestions. Her favorite? The suggestions category, which offers up solutions and ideas for improvements directly from customers.

Sentiment score: After uploading your data to Keatext, you quickly get a sentiment score that functions as a reliable KPI and tracks overall customer sentiment. The cherry on top? For a more granular sense of what’s working and what’s not, you can filter the sentiment score according to topic or product.

As for the implementation process, Myshka describes it in one word: seamless. All she needed to do to gain insight was click on a link and create a username and password. No informations system implementation, no devops requirements. It was that easy.

The Result: A corporate shift

From a logistical standpoint, BRP’s work with Keatext allowed it to gain agility, act quickly and prioritize solutions based on customer needs and wants. Fundamentally, says Myshka, it helped the company include customer feedback in its daily operations: “The biggest improvement Keatext brought to us is facilitating or even participating in our culture change. BRP wants the customer to be at the center of everything it does. Having an easy way to understand and share what the customer wants helps us accomplish this.”

As the company continues to grow and adapt to shifting industry trends, BRP can rest assured they have a finger firmly planted on the market’s pulse – allowing them to continuously develop solutions, launch products that customers not only need, but love.